Altered Alterations

I was quite productive this weekend in both schoolwork and Engineering Faith. I have Beings of Worship working now, which means you can define the gods, heroes, and whatever else your people will worship. It took a fair while to get a system that crammed the massive variety of beings people might worship into a simple little discription. Some details need to be added (such as the concept of an evil being) but it’s going pretty well.

In addition, I did some testing to see exactly how all this stuff I’d set up was behaving. As it turns out, it’s behaving pretty psychotically. I set up a graph so you could see your faith’s progress over time, and took a look at how my three test accounts have been doing. My first account was doing quite normally. My second, and third though, had really bizarre spikes in their properties at regular intervals. The third also had a quite lame spike in population and subsequent plummet that can only be described as retarded.

I spent some time and tweaked some values, and it seems like the spike/drop behaviour is caused by my code for birth and death, and I have a feeling the weird downward-spike-and-resume behaviour is a bug in my graphing code. While I expected things to be behaving really weirdly (since I haven’t tested any of that stuff yet) it was amusing to actually see my bugs and graphed out like that. The game is complicated enough now that it’s starting to take a life of its own.

Now it gets serious.

Altering Time’s yearly makeover is done, and Engineering Faith is, as expected, the focus of 2005. “Faithful Engineering” has been launched, a full-fledged weblog to track the development progress. You can now expect fairly regular updates, which can be monitored through any RSS newsreader from my new news feed.

I will write here about progress, insights, and new ideas that go into the game. While I will continue to post in the Forum about it where appropriate, I will try to keep any new info here for everybody to see.

At the moment, I’m aiming for testing to begin by the end of the year. There’s no reason that can’t be accomplished - I’ve learned a lot in the last two years about web development and games, and I’m enjoying putting it to use.

Now back to coding!